Abstract
The government of Togo reintroduced Farmer Input Support Program (FISP) as one of its Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) in 2002. Since the introduction of the program, the studies that evaluate its effects on income have focused either on fertilizer or seed component, but not on both, which made it a challenge to find out what improvements in small-scale farmers’ productivity can be attributed to FISP as a whole. Using Propensity Score Matching technique with collected data from 150 randomly surveyed households in the Kara region of Togo, the authors of the study estimated the impact of FISP on beneficiary households’ output from maize production. The results show that FISP augmented household annual maize income by 30.8% and total household income by 13.9% for both 2016/17 and 2017/18 cropping seasons. However, even though FISP is achieving its objective of improving small-scale farmers’ income, this increment is still not large enough to take households above the poverty line, and the effects of FISP to reduce overall poverty is also limited.
Highlights
Fighting rural poverty in Low-Income Countries (LICs) whose economic sectors facilitate dualism regarding economic growth and development remains a serious challenge to their governments
An interview conducted by our field workers on farmers on 16 May 2018 revealed that some of them had a positive perception about Farmer Input Support Program (FISP)
While the methodologies used in these studies for evaluating the effect of FISP on household income shows a relationship between FISP and income, they do not take into consideration the seed component of the program and a perfect resulted in an underestimation of the program effect on income
Summary
Fighting rural poverty in Low-Income Countries (LICs) whose economic sectors facilitate dualism regarding economic growth and development remains a serious challenge to their governments. Compounding the problem is when such a country is in sub-Sahara Africa, where low asset possession accompanies poverty (Oya, 2009). Agricultural policy is one obvious candidate for most LICs (Rosenzweig & Wolpin, 1993). This choice comes with many challenges because the evaluation of such policies becomes difficult at the local farmer level. This research paper tries to assess the effectiveness of the Farmer Input Support Program (FISP) in fighting rural poverty for sustainable agriculture in Togo
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